


i could not see to see

by kermiethefrog



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Suicide, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 14:13:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16160546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kermiethefrog/pseuds/kermiethefrog
Summary: Death is not always final. It is not always a choice. It cannot always be orchestrated by his weary hands—not when Lucifer can still reach him. Sam knows.





	i could not see to see

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed self harm and suicide tags—that's basically what this entire fic is. Written for SPN Summergen for interstellarstorms.

It happens in the cage first.

Sam curls in the corner. Lucifer laughs, calls it his _time-out space_ , throws him there if Sam still fights back. His back curves away from the two archangels, breathing labored and ragged in his throat.

Time is useless—Sam knows that it flows differently in Hell. Dean was chained to the rack for four months that felt like forty years. Sam has no point of reference here either way, a silent ticking of an invisible clock where there aren’t any sunrises to signal new days. Besides, he doesn’t get to sleep. It’s an ongoing torture that Lucifer never gets tired of.

His entire body feels wrecked. He has never known what it feels like to own it for himself.

He mindlessly scratches at a blood-rusted imperfection in his corner—a habit he picked up, one that leaves his fingernail picked and bleeding. It’s a focus away from the lingering pain of Lucifer’s fingers digging into his hips and the knowledge that the next thing the archangel decides to do will be worse; Sam can’t let himself think about what has happened and what will happen. Just what is happening. Just every slow and silent ticking second.

Sam wishes he could flinch when his fingernail gives. 

His body is in a constant state of fresh aches; blood and bile tint the roof of his mouth. There are new tortures and old haunts, and the carving-out of his insides is one that Lucifer prefers, one that he revisits time and time again. Sam’s finger picks as tears flood his waterline—he knows not to relish these moments when Lucifer takes a moment to breathe because it means hoping it won’t start again.

It will always start again.

His breath hitches when something comes loose under his finger.

It’s a nail, sliding out of its hole as the rust around it gives way underneath Sam’s shaking fingertips. He curls his palm around it and holds it against his chest, heart beating rabbit-quick; a weapon, maybe, once Lucifer gets close enough. Stabbed right through his eye, or into his jugular, or when he lowers Sam onto his knees—

 _No_ , his mind whispers, _it’s not that easy. It’s never that easy._

“Ready for round two, Sammy-boy?” Lucifer calls behind him. 

It’s a split-second decision. Lucifer hauls him onto his knees, and Sam unfurls his fist.

He shuts his eyes tight and drags the sharp edge up his forearm. Repeats the long line up the other side and gasps out a choked noise as the blood rushes through to his fingertips, dripping warm against his thighs. It leaves him light-headed in an instant and he can’t help but laugh, a long, breathy, torn-up sound from the pit of his stomach. 

He slowly blinks his eyes open and grins.

“Fuck you,” he says, giddy with the headrush. He wavers on his knees, collapsing onto his side—he hardly feels it with the throbbing through his arms. The ticking is just as loud as his heartbeat now, a hollow and clean tock that resounds neatly in his ears.

He closes his eyes and awaits the sound of the Impala rumbling underneath him.

When he wakes, he takes in a sharp breath and gasps into sitting up—blood and bile tint the roof of his mouth, mirrored scarred lines drag up his arms, and Lucifer pats his cheek from where he’s crouching.

“I told you I’d bring you back, didn’t I, Sam? Can’t let my favorite toy get away.”

Sam doesn’t cry. He just accepts.

—

The world is unsteady underneath his feet and it echoes rattling chains in the edges of his mind.

Nobody warns that you don’t feel alive after your first attempt, not really. Sam has known what it feels like to be living on borrowed time; there was a knotted scar at the base of his spine that proved it. It’s gone now, but in his new body, fixed with angelic grace and soul restored by Death itself, Sam still feels every dragged out year like an unwanted anchor.

Millenia crawled across every ticking second. Sam’s not always sure if he made it out alive.

Every smile is on the brink of breaking. Every assurance curls in his mouth like a lie. He’s escaped, but he can’t stop feeling Lucifer’s fingers digging into his hips. He’s escaped, but he’s not always sure he did. Still—he closes his eyes and tries to believe it.

At the very least, he can make Dean believe it; his brother can carry enough faith for the both of them when faith has always weighed so heavy on Sam’s shoulders. 

It’s four twenty-seven in the morning. The neon red glow of the digital clock face is familiar in a way that makes his stomach lurch. Sam rolls out of bed, feet landing soft on the hardwood flooring as he tries to breathe out evenly. It doesn’t work—nothing really does. 

Fingers dig into the corners of his eyes. Exhaustion weighs on him like the pinprick tip of a knife in the center of his spine and he’s falling backwards into his own grave—a slow-motion stutter that digs the blade deeper, inch by inch. He can’t find it in himself to sleep, not when he goes back there the second his eyes are closed. Sorting out the blurred lines of what is real and what isn’t is difficult enough when he’s awake.

Besides, it’s hard for him to relish moments of quiet when he’s had thousands of years to tell himself otherwise—

_It will always start again._

Dean says that he’s safe now. Sam hasn’t felt safe since he left Stanford.

He makes it to the bathroom, legs shaking, just as his stomach rolls hard enough to make the world go off-kilter. The porcelain of the toilet bowl is freezing underneath his fingertips where he has it in a vice grip—he empties his stomach, mostly an herbal tea blend and dry toast, and flutters his eyes shut.

He’s home, he’s home, _he’s home_ —

He pushes up onto his feet and flushes the toilet with shaking fingers. He thinks about slipping and slamming his face into the sink. He thinks that might not be so bad. A two, maybe. Being flayed and stitched together again by the Devil wearing Dean’s face, having pieces of flesh sliced off on the butcher’s hook and fed into his unwilling mouth, being held together by merciless fingers and finally raped—that’s a ten. 

He can still hear the way Lucifer laughed when Sam was put together again; fragmented, hollowed out, a broken boy.

Old haunts. Bile and blood in his mouth. Sam stares into the cracked mirror of Bobby’s second-story bathroom and slaps himself just to feel a pain orchestrated by his own hands. His body has never been his to own, but he can wreck it just as much as anyone else—he has that, at least. 

“You’re okay,” he whispers—the thing that stares back is hollow and disbelieving. He tries again. “You’re okay.”

He persists. He has to.

—

Sam blinks slow. Each breath is ragged in his chest, and he looks away from the doctor’s face, down to his wrapped forearms. It’s a familiar sight—werewolves and ghouls and vampires and demons, they all leave him just as battered and bruised. This is his doing. His stitches itch, and Sam wants to see them come undone.

Lucifer tuts in disappointment at his thoughts.

“He made me,” Sam croaks out. Lucifer waves with his fingers, perched against the doctor’s desk, and Sam swallows acid. “And he brought me back again.”

“Sam,” the doctor starts, and Sam knows what he’s going to say. He knows because Sam has told it to himself, over and over—Lucifer is in the cage, it’s all in his mind, these are just hallucinations. Sam knows, but he can’t help feeling like—

“We’re going to put you on watch for now,” the doctor continues, and Sam bites the inside of his cheek. His mouth floods with copper, and he swipes his tongue against the taste. “Just as a precaution.”

Sam nods. Slow, like the drip-drop of ink in water. It spreads sickly across his chest, inhaling doubt with every quiet motion of his head. Tastes like poison on his tongue and leaves his lungs rattling.

He needs to be _watched_. Like panic room detoxing, like being punished. Sam does what he can to save the world and only ever gets punished.

“You’re really going cuckoo, Sammy,” Lucifer says, and Sam curls in his corner—this one is pristine-white, a sanitized brightness that reminds him of Holy Light. It burns where it touches the darkest parts of his safety-pin soul. “And I didn’t even need to do anything.”

A firecracker goes off by his bare feet, and he flinches. He’s been out of the cage for weeks, months. Centuries, maybe. A slow ticking demise. Sam scratches into his stitches, pick-pick-picking for a rusted nail, for relief. He made it out. He made it out, but he’s only half-sure.

Another firecracker goes off.

—

Sam closes his eyes and tries to breathe.

It’s difficult. Everything comes crushing around his lungs, drowning the inside of his ribcage—the smell of blood-rust, the hollow sound of metal, Lucifer’s laughter. He presses against an old scar that no longer pains him, but there is nothing left in his nerves except the sense memory of a place he thought he had survived.

 _I did_ , Sam tells himself, and his heart beats childlike and frightened to the contrary, _I have._

“He’s not with you. He’s never been with you,” Lucifer says. It grips the dying vestiges of faith in his chest and twists them until it’s nothing but blood and viscera. “It was always just me.”

Sam takes in a trembling breath. 

“So I guess I am your only hope.”

A tear slips. There’s a wrecked-soul part of him that screams and rattles against his ribcage—it always comes back to this place. It always comes back to the two of them. _It will always start again_. His voice is hoarse, dragging in his throat. “It’s never going to happen.”

“Settle in there, buddy.” Lucifer turns from him, stepping across the cage. There’s a slow trickle of fear that Sam tries to smother, rolling up from his unsettled stomach, drawing acid into his throat. Lucifer turns back, and Sam tilts his head away, swallowing thickly. “Hey, roomie—upper bunk? Lower bunk?”

Sam knows what’s going to happen next. He aches with the phantom pain of it—millenia of torture, built upon the ruins of his pillaged body. The shudder that comes is inevitable, no matter how hard he tries to suppress it.

“Or do you wanna share?”

It’s a quick dip, fingers drawing up his boot to the knife tucked within it. Lucifer gives him a look—amused, dry, challenging—and Sam holds it in his trembling fingers as he stands tall, staring the Devil in the eyes.

“Really, Sammy? You wanna tango?” he mocks, and Sam takes in a deep breath.

The blade drags across his throat, a clean-cut finish. Sam can wreck his own body as much as anyone else, and he crumbles, legs giving way as he chokes on the warm rush of blood. 

He knows he dies. He feels it—it’s happened enough times now that he is all-too familiar. When he wakes, Lucifer cradles his face, smooths blood away from his throat. His grip is just too-tight, possessive in how his fingers curl into his flesh, and Sam closes his eyes. 

_Get into bed with the Devil once—_

“How about we keep this our little secret, huh? No need to worry Dean-o,” Lucifer says. Sam trembles when he breathes, each new-life inhale just as painful as the last in his carved lungs. “He might think you need to be admitted.”

Cold-smother laughter rings out in his ears. He is familiar with the pain that comes next, but Sam doesn’t keep himself from fighting back. Not this time.

—

The last word in his mouth is his brother’s name, and Sam thinks that’s appropriate. It’s a bloodrush that is immediate— _it ends bloody, it ends bad_ —and he wishes relief wasn’t the first sensation flooding his lungs, but he’s known this was coming for a long time now, and he’s ready to go.

He closes his eyes and awaits the sound of the Impala rumbling underneath him.

Sam gasps back to life. There is whole skin spread across his throat where there should be a chunk ripped out, clutched between vampire teeth, and Sam wants to dig into flesh and bone until he's made undone again. Blood and bile tint the roof of his mouth, and he knows this sensation immediately, intimately—he presses the heels of his palms into his eyelids and fights back a sob.

His body has never let him forget.


End file.
